You cannot upgrade your system to a software group that is not installed
on the system. For example, if you previously installed the End User Solaris
Software Group on your system, you cannot use the upgrade option to upgrade
to the Developer Solaris Software Group. However, during the upgrade you can
add software to the system that is not part of the currently installed software
group.

You can upgrade a system that has non-global zones installed with the
Solaris installation program, Solaris Live Upgrade or JumpStart. The following
limitations apply:

Solaris Live Upgrade is the recommend program to upgrade or
patch a system. Other upgrade programs might require extensive upgrade time,
because the time required to complete the upgrade increases linearly with
the number of installed non-global zones. If you are patching a system with
Solaris Live Upgrade, you do not have to take the system to single-user mode
and you can maximize your system's uptime.

When you use a Solaris Flash archive to install, an
archive that contains non-global zones is not properly installed on your system.

You cannot use Solaris Live Upgrade to patch a Solaris 10 inactive boot
environment when the active boot environment is running the Solaris 8 or 9
OS. Solaris Live Upgrade will invoke the patch utilities on the active boot
partition to patch the inactive boot partition. The Solaris 8 and Solaris
9 patch utilities are unaware of Solaris Zone, Service Management Facility (SMF), and
other enhancements in the Solaris 10 OS. Therefore the patch utilities fail
to correctly patch an inactive Solaris 10 boot environment. Therefore, if
you are using Solaris Live Upgrade to upgrade a system from the Solaris 8
or Solaris 9 OS to the Solaris 10 OS, you must first activate the Solaris
10 boot environment before patching. After the Solaris 10 boot environment
is activated, you can either patch the active boot environment directly or
set up another inactive boot environment and patch that one by using Solaris
Live Upgrade.

If you have non-global zones installed, you must migrate the
affected file systems from VxVM file systems to UFS file systems. You cannot
use the Solaris Live Upgrade procedure in the previous procedure.

Upgrade Programs

You can perform a standard interactive upgrade with the Solaris installation
program or an unattended upgrade with the custom JumpStart installation method.
Solaris Live Upgrade enables you to upgrade a running system.

Upgrade Program

Description

For More Information

Solaris Live Upgrade

Enables you to create a copy of the currently running system. The copy
can be upgraded and then a reboot switches the upgraded copy to become the
currently running system. Using Solaris Live Upgrade reduces the downtime
that is required to upgrade the Solaris OS. Also, Solaris Live Upgrade can
prevent problems with upgrading. An example is the ability to recover from
an upgrade if the power fails, because the copy being upgraded is not the
currently running system.

Provides an automated upgrade. A profile file and optional preinstallation
and postinstallation scripts provide the information required. When creating
a custom JumpStart profile for an upgrade, specify install_type upgrade.
You must test the custom JumpStart profile against the system's disk configuration
and currently installed software before you upgrade. Use the pfinstall -D command on the system that you are upgrading to test
the profile. You cannot test an upgrade profile by using a disk configuration
file.

Installing a Solaris Flash Archive Instead of
Upgrading

The Solaris Flash installation
feature provides a method of creating a copy of the whole installation from
a master system that can be replicated on many clone systems. This copy is
called a Solaris Flash archive. You can install an archive by using any
installation program.

Caution –

A Solaris Flash archive cannot be properly created when
a non-global zone is installed. The Solaris Flash feature is not compatible
with Solaris Zones partitioning technology. If you create a Solaris Flash
archive, the resulting archive is not installed properly when the archive
is deployed under these conditions:

The archive is created in a non-global zone

The archive is created in a global zone that has non-global
zones installed

Creating an Archive That Contains Large Files

The default copy method that is used when you create a Solaris Flash archive
is the cpio utility. Individual file sizes cannot be greater
than 4 Gbytes. If you have large individual files, the flarcreate command
with the -L pax option uses the pax utility
to create an archive without limitations on individual file sizes. Individual
file sizes can be greater than 4 Gbytes.

Upgrading With Disk Space Reallocation

The upgrade option in the Solaris installation program and the upgrade keyword in the custom JumpStart program provide the ability to
reallocate disk space. This reallocation automatically changes the sizes of
the disk slices. You can reallocate disk space if the current file systems
do not have enough space for the upgrade. For example, file systems might
need more space for the upgrade for the following reasons:

The Solaris software group that is currently installed on
the system contains new software in the new release. Any new software that
is included in a software group is automatically selected to be installed
during the upgrade.

The size of the existing software on the system has increased
in the new release.

The auto-layout feature attempts to reallocate the disk space to accommodate
the new size requirements of the file system. Initially, auto-layout attempts
to reallocate space, based on a set of default constraints. If auto-layout
cannot reallocate space, you must change the constraints on the file systems.

Note –

Auto-layout does not have the ability to “grow” file
systems. Auto-layout reallocates space by the following process:

Backing up required files on the file systems that need to
change.

Repartitioning the disks on the basis of the file system changes.

Restoring the backup files before the upgrade happens.

If you are using the Solaris installation program, and auto-layout
cannot determine how to reallocate the disk space, you must use the custom
JumpStart program to upgrade.

Backing Up And Restarting Systems For an Upgrade

Backing up your existing file systems before you upgrade to the Solaris
OS is highly recommended. If you copy file systems to removable media, such
as tape, you can safeguard against data loss, damage, or corruption.

In previous releases, the restart mechanism enabled you to continue
an upgrade after a loss of power or other similar problem. Starting with the
Solaris 10 10/08 release, the restart mechanism is unreliable. If you have
a problem, your upgrade might not restart.